Random Symbol Generator

What the random symbol generator does

You need a symbol. Something to paste into a document, a character you know exists but cannot find on your keyboard, a mark for a diagram, a thing to put between two other things.

Press the button and you get one. Press Copy and it is on your clipboard.

What follows is about how astonishingly recent all of this is.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you need a particular kind of mark, a batch if you are browsing.
2. Press Generate. A fresh draw every time.
3. Press Copy and paste it wherever you need it.

Every one of these has a birthday

Symbols feel eternal. They sit in the same mental drawer as the letters, and the letters feel like weather: nobody made them, they were simply there, and you learned them the way you learned that fire is hot.

This is completely wrong, and the plus sign will show you how wrong.

The + and − signs first appeared in print in 1489, in a book by a German mathematician called Johannes Widmann. The book was called, in the German of the day, something along the lines of Nimble and Neat Calculation in All Trades.

Look at that title. Trades. It is not a mathematics book. It is a manual for merchants.

And in it, the plus and the minus do not mean add and subtract. They are not operations at all. They are warehouse marks. A container that had more in it than the paperwork said got one mark. A container that was short got the other. Surplus and deficit. A man with a ledger and a lot of barrels needed a fast way to write down which ones were over and which were under, and the two most useful symbols in the history of arithmetic started life as stock control.

The plus is older than that, even, and stranger. Before it was a warehouse mark it was handwriting. Around 1360 Nicole Oresme was writing the Latin word et, meaning and, over and over, at speed, and the t and the e collapsed into each other the way letters do when a hand is in a hurry. That squashed remnant of the word "and" is the plus sign. You are looking at somebody's shorthand from the fourteenth century, fossilised.

Once you know it is possible to date these things, the whole drawer opens up, and the dates are absurd.

The square root sign turns up in 1525. Brackets, for grouping, in 1544. The decimal point in 1593. The multiplication sign in 1618, and the plus-or-minus in 1628, both from the same man, William Oughtred, who was a country clergyman doing mathematics in his spare time.

Mathematics is at least four thousand years old. The multiplication sign is four hundred.

Which raises a question that is genuinely hard to hold in your head. What were they doing for the other three thousand six hundred years?

They were writing it out. In sentences. In whatever language they happened to speak. Every problem, every step, every relationship, spelled out in prose, at length, by hand.

Two lines of one length

Which brings us to a Welshman who got fed up.

Robert Recorde was born in Tenby, in Pembrokeshire, around 1510. He went to Oxford, then to Cambridge to qualify as a physician, then back to Oxford to teach mathematics in public, which almost nobody was doing in English at the time. He ended up in London as physician to Edward the Sixth and then to Mary, and he did a stint at the Royal Mint, which is a decent career by any measure.

In 1557 he published a book with the magnificent title The Whetstone of Witte. It was an algebra text, one of the first in English, and it was the first book in the language to use those plus and minus signs at all.

And somewhere in the middle of it, Recorde ran out of patience.

He was writing out equations, and every single time two things were equal he had to write the words is equal to. Three words. Over and over, down the page, for the length of a book. And he thought: no.

So he drew two short horizontal lines, one above the other, and explained himself in a sentence that has outlived every other thing he wrote. He would set down, as he often did in his work, a pair of parallels, or Gemowe lines of one length, and he chose them for a reason he stated flatly: because no two things can be more equal.

Gemowe is an old word for twin. Twin lines, of one length. Two things that are the same, drawn as two things that are the same, so that the mark tells you what it means just by being what it is.

That is the equals sign. Every one you have ever written, in every sum you did at school, in every line of code, in every spreadsheet: two lines of one length, because a Welsh physician in 1557 was tired of writing three words and thought of a good reason for the shape he picked instead.

He was doing it to save labour. He said so. It is the least grand motivation imaginable and it produced possibly the most-used symbol on Earth.

Notation is not decoration

Here is where it stops being trivia.

It is tempting to read all this as a story about convenience. Mathematics existed, people did it in words, then somebody invented shorthand and it got quicker. Tidier. Same thinking, less writing.

That is not what happened.

Try it. Take a plain quadratic equation, one that a fifteen-year-old would solve without looking up, and write it out in a sentence. No symbols. Words only. Then solve it, in words, showing your steps.

You will not be able to. Not slowly. Not at all.

Because you will lose track. Prose runs in one direction, front to back, and it has no way to hold two things side by side and let you look at both at once. The moment you need to see that this side and that side are the same shape, and that the shape can be rearranged, you need them next to each other, in space, where your eye can move between them. That is what the notation gives you. Not brevity. Room.

The symbol is not a record of the thought. The symbol is the apparatus you think with.

Which is why the dates matter. Algebra did not take off and then acquire convenient shorthand. Algebra took off because the shorthand arrived, and it could not have happened in the other order, because the thing algebra does is manipulate the shape of a statement, and you cannot see the shape of a statement written as a paragraph. Recorde was not tidying up mathematics. He was building the surface it would be done on for the next five centuries, and he thought he was saving himself some ink.

All of which is worth remembering the next time you look at a page of symbols and feel locked out of it. Nobody was born able to read this. It is not a natural language and it is not an ancient one. It is a pile of labour-saving devices invented by individual, impatient people, most of them in the last four hundred years, each of whom just wanted to stop writing something out by hand.

The marks in this list are tools. Somebody made every one of them. They can be learned in the order they were invented, and they usually make more sense that way.

Where these come from

The symbols are drawn from a set our team assembled and checked by hand, covering punctuation, currency, mathematics, logic and arrows. Your browser picks from them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Will these paste correctly into anything?

Almost always. These are standard characters rather than images, so they travel as text and land as text: documents, spreadsheets, code, messages, form fields. Whether they look right depends on the font at the other end, and the mathematical and arrow characters are the ones most likely to meet a font that has never heard of them.

Why are these not on my keyboard?

Because a keyboard has about a hundred keys and writing has tens of thousands of characters, so somebody had to choose, and the choice was made a long time ago based on what an English-language typewriter needed. Everything else moved into menus, shortcuts and lists like this one. The keyboard is not a map of what exists. It is a map of what was common in 1873.

Is the minus sign the same as a hyphen?

No, and they are different characters, which is why both are in here. The hyphen is short and sits low, the minus is longer and sits at the height of the crossbar on a plus, so that arithmetic lines up. Most people use the hyphen for everything and most of the time nothing bad happens, but in typeset mathematics the difference is visible and mildly maddening.

What is the difference between the two dashes?

The longer one is the em dash, the shorter one is the en dash, and they are named after the width of a capital M and a capital N in old typesetting. Conventionally the en dash joins ranges and the em dash breaks a sentence apart. Plenty of good writers avoid both entirely and lose nothing.

Why do currency symbols look the way they do?

Most of them are a letter with a line struck through it, and the line is the whole idea: it says this letter is money now. The pound is an L for the Latin libra, a pound weight. The euro is a C for Europe with two strokes. Once you see the trick you can read most of them on sight.

Can the same symbol come up twice?

Not within a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play.

References

1. Amstat News (2026). This month in statistics history: the origin of math symbols. American Statistical Association. https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2026/04/01/history-of-math-symbols/
2. Swetz, F. J. and Katz, V. J. (2008). Mathematical treasures: Robert Recorde's Whetstone of Witte. Convergence, Mathematical Association of America. https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasures-robert-recordes-whetstone-of-witte
3. Table of mathematical symbols by introduction date. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols_by_introduction_date